Monthly Archives: April 2013

Please, please we need more dementia nurses

April 2, 2013   Alzheimer’s, Carers, dementia

Specialist dementia nurses could save NHS £11m a year, Southampton experts claim

8:00am Monday 1st April 2013 in News  By Melanie Adams, Health Reporter

SPECIALIST dementia nurses could save the health service £11m a year, according to experts in Southampton.

A report by the University of Southampton and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is calling for greater support, funding and training of specialist nurses to boost care for dementia patients and save millions of pounds by slashing the time sufferers are in hospital.

With more than 20,000 people suffering from the devastating disease in Southampton and Hampshire, it has highlighted the significant contribution made by specialist dementia nurses in hospitals and found that if they were properly funded and trained, they could reduce hospital stays for older people by one day on average – a saving of almost £11m.

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Care in Japan

April 1, 2013   Carers, disability, Older care

Artwork made by Japanese patients in care comes to London

Much of the work on show at Wellcome Collection, including an embroidered suit, was produced in therapy classes

 

An artwork by 17-year-old Japanese artist Norimitsu Kokubo, Shanghai Disneyland of the Future.

Works of art made of scraps of thread, off-cuts of paper, and cardboard boxes salvaged from a care home’s kitchen and carefully smoothed flat have gone on display at the Wellcome Collection in London, in the first exhibition in the UK of Japanese “outsider art”.

When curator Shamita Sharmacharja visited Japan to speak to the artists who made the works she found them slightly surprised that their work was considered art. To them it was just what they do, often in almost all their waking hours.

“In Japan, the concept of outsider art does not really exist,” she said. “It is something they are learning about from European interest in it.”

Outsider art was coined as a term to describe art created beyond mainstream culture, such as in mental health institutions, although it now more generally defines work made by artists without art school training and outside the market. In the Wellcome show all the work has been made in institutions or day care centres.

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NHS 111 helpline put on hold after safety warnings

April 1, 2013   Carers, health, hospital, Older care

Half of NHS 111 lines yet to be launched after ‘national roll-out’ falls flat

The planned roll-out of the NHS 111 non-emergency line across the entire country today has been aborted amid concerns it is wasting emergency services’ time and putting patients at risk.

 

NHS England, which is overseeing the scheme, had already admitted that not all services would be ready in time for April 1 but it was still widely expected that most would meet the deadline.

By , Science Correspondent

7:30AM BST 01 Apr 2013

Easter Monday was initially meant to mark the national launch of the telephone service, which is replacing NHS Direct, but half of all 111 lines are still inactive.

Just one local service, in the North of Tyne and Tees area, will be opened today, joining 22 which are already running as pilots, but a further 23 are not yet operational.

Doctors claimed health chiefs had been forced to backtrack on plans to roll out the service after repeated warnings that the system was inefficient and could compromise patient safety.

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